LANGALIBALELE, (MTHETHWA)

Langalibalele (1818-1889) was the ruler of the AmaHlubi who had settled near Ntabamhlope on the foothills of the Kwahlamba (Drakensberg) mountains. He precipitated a crisis in 1873 when he refused to force his followers to register their guns and then failed to appear before Natal’s white authorities when he was summoned to explain his policy.

PHOTO CAPTION: Langalibalele Mthethwa. SOURCE: EA Library

Colonial troops were sent to apprehend him by force but he managed to escape to Lesotho where he was captured, returned to Natal, tried for sedition, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment on Robben Island in 1874. Both King Cetshwayo of KwaZulu and Bishop John Colenso of the Anglican Church in Natal, worked for Langalibalele’s release.

Langalibalele was born the year his father, Mthimkulu, heir to Bangani, king of the AmaHlubi, died in a battle against the AmaNgwane of Matiwane, another powerful Nguni-speaking group. Langalibalele (“Scorching Sun”), his father’s third son, was so named because he was born during a rainless period. A nucleus of the once powerful AmaHlubi, yielding to the growing power of the KwaZulu, still kept its ancient home along the Buffalo River, from its source to its junction with the Tukela.

In 1848 Langalibalele refused to heed a summons by Mpande, the Zulu king, to appear at the royal court, fearing that he might be executed the same way his elder brother, Dhloma, had been executed by Dingane, the Zulu king. Mande gathered an army and Langalibalele escaped into Natal colony. He then settled in the Klip River area from where he was again forced to move by white Natal’s powerful secretary of Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone. He then went to the foothills of the Kwahlamba (Drakensberg) where his followers and his neighbours, the AmaPutini, acted as a buffer to protect white farmers from San raiders.

Langalibalele’s aristocratic ties to the AmaHlubi and his reputation as a rainmaker made him a semi-sacred person with supernatural and temporal powers respected by many blacks in southern Africa. He was also related to the AmaSwazi and the Basotho.

In the 1870s many of his young men who worked in the diamond fields of Kimberley returned home with guns as partial payment of their wages. The Natal government required that all guns be registered with the local magistrate. Africans believed that during the registration process, guns lost firing pins and other functional components and were returned to their African owners as useless toys. White Natalians, nervous that their African countrymen outnumbered them 18 to 1, were likely to become hysterical at the least sign of African “insubordination.”

While Langalibalele encouraged some of his followers to register guns, he was not enthusiastic about the idea, and when he was summoned to appear before the white magistrate, he demurred. Later, historians would find that Natal’s white authorities enforced the registration ordinance selectively against independent-minded African rulers.

Colonial troops were dispatched to arrest him in October 1873. He managed to escape into Lesotho through what is now called Langalibalele Pass, but a skirmish between his followers and colonial troops led to the death of five men. The full-scale military operations which followed led to the death of hundreds of Africans. Langalibalele was arrested in the Leribe district of Lesotho with the help of Jonathan Molapo in 1874. He was then brought back to Natal in chains, tried at Pietermaritzburg, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. The lands, possessions, and stock of the AmaHlubi and the AmaPutini were confiscated.

Bishop Colenso of Natal and King Cetshwayo of the AmaZulu both sympathised with Langalibalele and Colenso mounted a campaign for Langalibalele’s release. In 1875 he was released from Robben Island and restricted to a farm called Uitvlugt near Cape Town but was not allowed to return to Natal until 1887. He died there two years later.

Langalibalele’s arrest, trial, and sentence brought to a head the issue of African disarmament, which led to the Gun War between the BaSotho and the Cape Colony in 1880. As a rainmaker, Langalibalele’s prestige spread throughout southern Africa, and King Lobengula of the AmaNdebele, in what is now Zimbabwe, refused to welcome a missionary society associated with the betrayal and arrest of Langalibalele in Lesotho. Langalibalele’s trial and punishment was one of those pre-arranged legal proceedings that have sent many African leaders who stood for the rights of their people to prison. Langalibalele was a victim of the equivalent of legalised lynching to protect white supremacy.

C. TSEHLOANE KETO